The Recurring Cycle of Antisemitism, Teaching Guide

Teach Jewish History · The Recurring Cycle

Reference · Teach Jewish HistoryGrades · 8–12

Read one episode of antisemitism and it looks like history, finished, behind glass. Read several side by side and a shape appears: the same patterns, returning across centuries and continents. The shape is still forming today.

Why this guide exists

A lens for reading every other page.

Each Chapter on this site tells one story in full: the blood libel, the ghetto system, the Russian pogroms, the forged Protocols, and the rest. This guide reads them together.

Across them, Jews are blamed when trouble comes and pictured as less than human. Laws then set them apart, and they are attacked or driven out, often while officials look away. Then the community rebuilds, in place or somewhere new.

The pattern, named

By lies, by law, by force. Then rebuilt.

Across the episodes this site documents, eight patterns appear again and again, and each can be found in every period from the ancient world to today. Not every episode shows all eight, and the order can change.

The hostility itself changed over time. In the ancient world it came from rival temples, empires, and writers, and historians often call it Judeophobia. Later, Christian teaching gave it religious form, and Church law, and in Islamic lands the dhimma, set Jews apart. In the 1800s it was recast as hatred of a “race,” which conversion could not escape, and in 1879 the word antisemitism came into wide use (The Racial Turn of 1879). The chart follows what stayed the same through those changes.

Select a box for places, dates, and the Chapter that tells the full story. marks a box that includes an act of law or an official order. Each example, and the Chapter that tells it, is listed in the Notes on the chart.

By lies False charges and images that turn people against them

Accused

When trouble comes, Jews are blamed for a crime or disaster they did not commit.

Ancient · Slanders in Egypt

Egypt, about 270 BCE: a history attributed to the priest Manetho retells the Exodus with the Jews as lepers driven out. Alexandria, 1st century CE: the writer Apion claims Jews sacrifice a Greek captive.

Read more: Adversus Judaeos.

Medieval · Blamed for murder and plague

Norwich, England, 1144: the first known ritual-murder charge, which grows into the blood libel. Strasbourg, in today’s France, 1349: Jews are blamed for the Black Death, and about 2,000 are burned, by a chronicler’s count.

Dehumanized

Jews are mocked, or shown as animals or monsters, not people.

Ancient · Mocking stories

Alexandria, 1st century CE: Apion claims Jews worship a donkey’s head in their Temple.

Read more: Adversus Judaeos.

Medieval · Animal carvings on churches

Germany, from the 1200s: carvings on churches show Jews with a pig.

Spread

The lies travel by whatever is new: books, sermons, print, radio, feeds.

Ancient · Books

Egypt and Alexandria: the slanders are written down in the history attributed to Manetho and in Apion’s books, and later writers repeat them.

Read more: Adversus Judaeos.

Medieval · Printed pictures

Trent (now Trento), Italy, 1475: a blood libel. By 1493, printed pictures carry it across Europe.

By law Rules that set Jews apart

Restricted

Laws decide where Jews may live, work, or worship.

Ancient · Laws against Judaism · includes law or official order

Judea, 167 BCE: the Greek king Antiochus IV outlaws Jewish practice and turns the Temple over to the worship of Zeus. From 423 CE, Roman law forbids building new synagogues, and from 438 it bars Jews from public office.

Medieval · Church law and the dhimma · includes law or official order

In the Islamic world, from the 600s, Jews pay a special tax, the jizya. By the 800s, rules mark them as lesser: they may not build new houses of worship or ride on saddles. Fez, Morocco, 1438: the first mellah. In Europe, 1215: Church law bars Jews from public office.

Marked

Jews are made easy to spot.

Ancient · Singled out by a tax · includes law or official order

Rome, from 70 CE: every Jew in the empire pays a special tax to Rome.

Source: Josephus, The Jewish War 7.218; Suetonius, Life of Domitian 12.2.

Medieval · Clothing and badges · includes law or official order

The Abbasid caliphate, 850: the caliph orders Jews and Christians to wear honey-colored clothing that marks them. Europe, from 1215: Church law requires special dress, which rulers turn into badges.

Read more: The Dhimma, Adversus Judaeos.

Early modern and modern · Hats and badges · includes law or official order

Venice: Jews leaving the ghetto by day must wear a yellow hat or badge. Rome, 1555: yellow hats.

Read more: The Ghetto System, The Museum.

Holocaust era · The Jewish star · includes law or official order

Nazi Germany and many lands it occupies force Jews to wear a Jewish star, usually yellow.

By force Violence and removal

Attacked

Mobs or governments turn to violence, often while officials look away.

Ancient · Temples and homes destroyed

Elephantine, Egypt, 410 BCE: Egyptian priests, backed by a local Persian commander, destroy the Jewish temple. Alexandria, 38 CE: mobs attack Jewish homes and synagogues.

Read more: Adversus Judaeos.

Medieval · Massacres · includes law or official order

Granada, Spain, 1066: a mob kills much of the Jewish community in a day. The Rhineland, in Germany, 1096: crusading mobs destroy Jewish communities. North Africa and Spain, from about 1146: the Almohad rulers order Jews to convert, flee, or die.

Expelled

Jews are forced to leave a city, a land, or a country.

Ancient · Expelled from Rome, barred from Jerusalem · includes law or official order

Rome, 19 CE: the emperor Tiberius expels the city’s Jews. 135 CE: after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, the emperor Hadrian bars Jews from Jerusalem, now the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina, and renames the province Syria Palaestina.

Read more: The Continuous Jewish Presence in the Land. Ancient sources for Rome, 19 CE: Tacitus, Annals 2.85; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.81–84.

Medieval · Expelled from kingdoms · includes law or official order

England, 1290. France, 1306. Spain, 1492. Portugal, 1497, mostly by forced conversion.

Afterward What the community does next

Rebuilt

The community survives and builds again, in place or somewhere new.

Ancient · Return and rebuild

Babylon destroys the First Temple in 586 BCE, and exiles return to rebuild it by 516 BCE. Rome destroys the Second Temple in 70 CE, and teachers at Yavneh rebuild Jewish life around study and prayer.

Medieval · Rebuilding after massacre and expulsion

Worms, in Germany, rebuilds its synagogue in 1175, after the massacres of 1096. After 1492, Spain’s exiles rebuild in the Ottoman Empire and found Constantinople’s first printing press within two years.

* includes an act of law or an official order. Places, dates, and sources for every box are in the Notes on the chart.
	Ancient	Medieval	Early modern and modern	Holocaust era	1945 to today
By lies: False charges and images that turn people against them
Accused	Slanders in Egypt	Blamed for murder and plague	Accused of treason	Collective guilt *	Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories *
Dehumanized	Mocking stories	Animal carvings on churches	Newspaper cartoons	Vermin propaganda	Recycled cartoons
Spread	Books	Printed pictures	Newspapers and forgeries	Newspapers and radio	Satellite TV, state media, and social media
By law: Rules that set Jews apart
Restricted	Laws against Judaism *	Church law and the dhimma *	Ghettos, the Pale, and the dhimma *	Jobs and citizenship taken *	Citizenship, travel, and the right to leave taken *
Marked	Singled out by a tax *	Clothing and badges *	Hats and badges *	The Jewish star *	ID papers and coded symbols *
By force: Violence and removal
Attacked	Temples and homes destroyed	Massacres *	Pogroms and forced conversions *	Pogroms *	Pogroms and terror attacks
Expelled	Expelled from Rome, barred from Jerusalem *	Expelled from kingdoms *	Driven from their homes *	Pushed across borders *	Driven from the Middle East and North Africa *
Afterward: What the community does next
Rebuilt	Return and rebuild	Rebuilding after massacre and expulsion	A new world	Survivors rebuild	New homes

Words to know

Abbasid caliphate: the Muslim empire ruled from Baghdad and Samarra, in today’s Iraq, from 750 to 1258.
Airlift: flying large numbers of people out of a place by plane.
al-Qaeda: an Islamist terrorist network, responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Almohads: a Muslim dynasty that ruled North Africa and Muslim Spain in the 1100s and 1200s.
Antisemitism: hostility to or hatred of Jews. The word came into wide use in Germany in 1879.
Bar Kokhba revolt: the Jewish revolt against Rome, 132 to 135 CE.
BCE: Before the Common Era. The same years as BC.
Black Death: a plague that killed about one in three people in Europe, 1347 to 1351.
Blood libel: the false claim that Jews kill Christians, often children, for religious rituals.
Caliph: the ruler of a Muslim empire, seen as the successor to the Prophet Muhammad.
Caricature: a drawing that exaggerates a person’s features to mock them.
CE: Common Era. The same years as AD.
Chronicler: a writer who recorded events as they happened.
Church law: rules made by the Catholic Church.
Citizenship: full membership in a country, with its rights and protection.
Collective guilt: blaming a whole group for what one person did.
Conspiracy theory: a false claim that a group is secretly plotting to control events.
Crusade: a Christian military campaign to capture Jerusalem. The first began in 1096. Some crusaders attacked Jewish communities on the way.
Dehumanize: to show people as less than human.
Deicide: the false charge that the Jewish people killed God by killing Jesus.
Dhimma: Islamic law’s arrangement with the Jews and Christians it ruled: protection of life and worship, in exchange for a tax and second-class terms.
Diplomat: a person who represents a country abroad.
Displaced persons (DP) camps: camps in Europe after World War II for survivors and refugees who had nowhere to go.
Doctors’ Plot: the false Soviet charge, in 1953, that Jewish doctors planned to kill the country’s leaders.
Dreyfus Affair: the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894 and cleared in 1906.
Exile: being forced to live away from your home or country.
Exit visa: government permission to leave a country.
Exodus: the Bible’s story of the Israelites leaving slavery in Egypt.
Expel: to force people to leave a city or country.
Farhud: the attack on the Jews of Baghdad, Iraq, in June 1941.
Forced conversion: making people give up their religion and take another, under threat.
Forgery: a fake document made to look real.
Genocide: the attempt to destroy a people.
Ghetto: a part of a city where Jews were forced to live, often walled and locked at night.
Great Replacement: a false conspiracy theory that white populations are being deliberately replaced by immigrants.
Hamas: the Islamist militant group that governed Gaza and led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Hanukkah: the Jewish Festival of Lights, an eight-day winter holiday.
Hezbollah: a Lebanese armed group and political party, backed by Iran.
Holocaust: the persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators, 1933 to 1945.
Holocaust denial: the false claim that the Holocaust did not happen, or was far smaller than it was.
Hostage: a person seized and held by force.
Islamist: describes a movement that seeks to rule by a strict reading of Islamic law.
Jewish star: the star badge, usually yellow, that Nazi Germany and many lands it occupied forced Jews to wear.
Jizya: the yearly tax non-Muslims paid under the dhimma.
Judeophobia: a term historians use for hostility to Jews in the ancient world.
Kristallnacht: “the Night of Broken Glass,” November 9 to 10, 1938, when Nazi stormtroopers and party members, joined by crowds, attacked Jews, synagogues, and Jewish shops across Germany and Austria.
Leper: a person with leprosy, a disease of the skin and nerves that people once greatly feared.
Massacre: the killing of many people who cannot defend themselves.
Medieval: from the Middle Ages, about 500 to 1500.
Mellah: a walled Jewish quarter in a Moroccan city.
Meme: a picture or video, often with text, copied and shared online.
Nazi: a member of Adolf Hitler’s party, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945.
Nostra Aetate: the 1965 Catholic Church statement that rejected blaming the Jewish people for Jesus’s death.
Nuremberg Laws: German laws of 1935 that took away Jews’ citizenship and banned marriage between Jews and other Germans.
Ottoman Empire: a Muslim empire ruled from today’s Turkey, about 1300 to 1922.
Pale of Settlement: the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews, with few exceptions, were required to live.
Pogrom: a violent mob attack on Jews.
Prejudice: a judgment about a group made without facts.
Propaganda: information, often false, spread to change what people believe or do.
The Protocols: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document first printed in Russia in 1903, claiming Jews secretly plan to rule the world.
Reichsmark: Germany’s money from 1924 to 1948.
Sermon: a speech given by a religious leader.
Slander: a false statement that harms someone’s name.
Sultan: the title of a ruler in many Muslim lands.
Synagogue: a Jewish house of prayer and study.
Temple: the center of Jewish worship in Jerusalem. The First Temple stood until 586 BCE, the Second until 70 CE.
Terror attack: violence against ordinary people to spread fear for a cause.
Treason: betraying your own country.
Triple parentheses: marks like (((this))) placed around a name online to mark it as Jewish.
Tsar: the title of the emperor of Russia.
Vermin: animals seen as pests, like rats.
White supremacist: a person who believes white people should rule over others.
Yavneh: the town where teachers rebuilt Jewish learning after Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 CE.
Zeus: the chief god of the ancient Greeks.
Zionism: the movement for a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel.

Places, and where they are today

Aden: Yemen
Alexandria: Egypt
Aleppo: Syria
Babylon: an ancient city and empire in today’s Iraq
Baghdad: Iraq
Constantinople: today Istanbul, Turkey
Djerba: an island in Tunisia
Elephantine: an island in the Nile, in southern Egypt
Fez: Morocco
Granada: Spain
Judea: the ancient Jewish kingdom, and later Roman province, around Jerusalem
Kishinev: today Chișinău, Moldova
Mashhad: Iran
Mawza: Yemen, near the Red Sea
Moscow: Russia
Norwich: England
Paris: France
Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania, United States
The Rhineland: western Germany, along the Rhine River
Strasbourg: France
Sydney: Australia
Trent: today Trento, Italy
Tripoli: Libya
Venice: Italy

Six episodes

Six episodes, start to finish.

The chart follows each pattern across time. These entries follow one episode each through the patterns, with a link to its Chapter.

Medieval Europe · from 1144

The blood libel

A child dies, and Jews are falsely accused of killing him for a religious ritual. Sermons and printed pictures spread the charge. Massacres and expulsions follow. Pope Innocent IV condemns the charge in 1247, but local clergy and crowds keep it alive. It returns in later centuries and circulates online today.

Early modern Europe · 1516 to 1870

The ghetto system

Laws seal Jews into a walled quarter of the city, with gates locked at night. Venice builds the first to be called a ghetto in 1516, and the last, in Rome, ends in 1870. Separation lasts for centuries.

Russian Empire · 1881 to 1906

The Russian pogroms

About five million Jews are held by law in the Pale of Settlement. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the 1905 revolution, bring crisis. In 1903 the blood libel is revived at Kishinev. Waves of pogroms follow while officials stand aside. Survivors rebuild, in America and in the Land of Israel.

Russia and beyond · from 1903

The forged Protocols

A forgery claims to prove a secret Jewish plan to rule the world. It travels from Tsarist Russia to Nazi Germany, to the Arab world, and to today’s internet, with the same charge in each new setting.

Europe and beyond · 1933 to 1945

The Holocaust era

A modern state takes the patterns to their extreme: propaganda, laws that mark Jews and strip their rights, deportation, and the murder of six million. Nazi influence also reaches North Africa and the Middle East.

1945 to today

Contemporary antisemitism

The old charges return in new words and new media, online and in the street. The site’s guide to hate symbols explains the codes and images in use today.

The reusable parts

A small set of myths, used again and again.

A few lies return in every era, fitted to the moment. Four recur most:

Deicide and malice: that Jews as a people are guilty of Jesus’s death and wish others harm. This is the root of the medieval libels. In 1965 the Catholic Church rejected the deicide charge in Nostra Aetate.
Money and greed: built on the laws that pushed Jews into moneylending, then turned into a claim about Jewish “nature.”
Disloyalty: that Jews are an alien element, loyal to one another rather than to the country they live in.
Hidden power and conspiracy: that a secret Jewish hand controls events. The Protocols set this myth down as a document.

The record this site documents shows Jewish communities living as part of the societies around them, century after century, and attacked or expelled even where they were most woven in, as in Spain in 1492 and Germany after 1933.

Into the present

Still in use.

The conspiracy forged in 1903 circulates today in new editions and new feeds. The caricature that filled a Nazi newspaper reappears as an online meme. Coded symbols mark Jews online, as badges once did. The site documents this in its Chapter on contemporary antisemitism and its guide to hate symbols.

Beyond this one history

Why it works as a case study.

The patterns are studied here through the Jewish experience because that record is long, well documented, and unusually continuous. The same patterns have been turned against many other groups, in many places: blame in a crisis, images that dehumanize, laws that set people apart, violence, and expulsion. Learning them through this well-documented case helps a reader recognize them wherever they appear.

How this guide is written

A summary of the record.

The patterns named here are a reading of the episodes the site documents elsewhere, each from primary sources and published scholarship. They are a lens for reading, and history does not repeat on a schedule. Where an episode departs from the pattern, the Chapter that tells it says so.

For the classroom

Where this fits the lessons you already teach.

Social studies standards ask students to analyze cause and effect, and continuity and change over time. In New York these are the Social Studies Practices of Chronological Reasoning and Causation, and of Comparison and Contextualization. Mapping the patterns across periods practices both.

Many teachers already use Gordon Allport’s Scale of Prejudice (1954) or Genocide Watch’s Ten Stages of Genocide. Those frameworks describe how prejudice escalates against any group. This chart is narrower and longer: one people, across nearly 2,500 years.

A pattern-recognition exercise

Give students two episodes from different centuries, such as the medieval blood libel and the Russian pogroms, and have them map each onto the eight patterns above. Where does each pattern appear? Which is missing or muted, and why? Then ask the harder question: can they find the same early patterns in a piece of present-day propaganda, using the hate-symbols guide as a key?

For a ready-made version, the printable handout Recognizing Propaganda: Then and Now pairs each myth with its modern form.

Notes on the chart

Every example, and where to read more.

Each example in the chart above is listed here with the Chapter that documents it. Where no Chapter covers an example, its ancient sources are given.

Accused

Ancient. Slanders in Egypt. Egypt, about 270 BCE: a history attributed to the priest Manetho retells the Exodus with the Jews as lepers driven out. Alexandria, 1st century CE: the writer Apion claims Jews sacrifice a Greek captive. Read more: Adversus Judaeos.
Medieval. Blamed for murder and plague. Norwich, England, 1144: the first known ritual-murder charge, which grows into the blood libel. Strasbourg, in today’s France, 1349: Jews are blamed for the Black Death, and about 2,000 are burned, by a chronicler’s count. Read more: The Blood Libel.
Early modern and modern. Accused of treason. Paris, 1894: Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, is falsely convicted of treason. Read more: The Racial Turn of 1879, The Primary Source vs. the Headline.
Holocaust era. Collective guilt. Germany, 1938: after one young man kills a German diplomat in Paris, the state fines all German Jews one billion Reichsmarks. Read more: The Years Before the Killing.
1945 to today. Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories. Moscow, 1953: the “Doctors’ Plot,” a false charge that Jewish doctors planned to kill Soviet leaders. Baghdad, 1969: nine Jews are hanged in public on invented spying charges. Deniers claim Jews invented or inflated the Holocaust, and since 2023, some call the sexual violence of October 7 an invention, though a UN mission found “reasonable grounds to believe” it occurred. Online: the “Great Replacement,” in its antisemitic form, claims Jews are plotting to replace white populations with immigrants. Read more: Soviet Jewry, The Departure from MENA, Common Misconceptions, Holocaust Denial and the Response, Hate Symbols.

Dehumanized

Ancient. Mocking stories. Alexandria, 1st century CE: Apion claims Jews worship a donkey’s head in their Temple. Read more: Adversus Judaeos.
Medieval. Animal carvings on churches. Germany, from the 1200s: carvings on churches show Jews with a pig. Read more: The Afterlife of the Image.
Early modern and modern. Newspaper cartoons. France, 1890s: antisemitic cartoons fill the press during the Dreyfus Affair. Read more: The Museum.
Holocaust era. Vermin propaganda. Germany, 1940: a Nazi film compares Jews to rats. Read more: Hate Symbols.
1945 to today. Recycled cartoons. Online: memes copy the caricatures of Nazi posters. Read more: Contemporary Antisemitism, Hate Symbols.

Spread

Ancient. Books. Egypt and Alexandria: the slanders are written down in the history attributed to Manetho and in Apion’s books, and later writers repeat them. Read more: Adversus Judaeos.
Medieval. Printed pictures. Trent (now Trento), Italy, 1475: a blood libel. By 1493, printed pictures carry it across Europe. Read more: The Blood Libel.
Early modern and modern. Newspapers and forgeries. Russia, 1903: a newspaper first prints the Protocols. Read more: The Protocols Forgery.
Holocaust era. Newspapers and radio. Germany, 1923 to 1945: the newspaper Der Stürmer spreads hatred of Jews every week. 1939 to 1945: Nazi radio also broadcasts it in Arabic. Read more: Hate Symbols, The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa.
1945 to today. Satellite TV, state media, and social media. September 17, 2001: Al-Manar, a satellite channel owned by Hezbollah, a Lebanese armed group, is the first known to air the claim that 4,000 Israelis stayed home on September 11. Retold, it becomes 4,000 Jews. Iran, from the 1990s: state leaders and state media deny the Holocaust. Today: the Protocols are still sold and shared, online and in print. Read more: Common Misconceptions, Holocaust Denial and the Response, The Protocols Forgery.

Restricted

Ancient. Laws against Judaism. Judea, 167 BCE: the Greek king Antiochus IV outlaws Jewish practice and turns the Temple over to the worship of Zeus. From 423 CE, Roman law forbids building new synagogues, and from 438 it bars Jews from public office. Read more: Judea in the Classical World, The Dhimma.
Medieval. Church law and the dhimma. In the Islamic world, from the 600s, Jews pay a special tax, the jizya. By the 800s, rules mark them as lesser: they may not build new houses of worship or ride on saddles. Fez, Morocco, 1438: the first mellah. In Europe, 1215: Church law bars Jews from public office. Read more: The Dhimma, Timeline.
Early modern and modern. Ghettos, the Pale, and the dhimma. Venice, 1516, and Rome, 1555: walled ghettos. The Russian Empire, from 1791: the Pale of Settlement. Ottoman reform decrees of 1839 and 1856 promise non-Muslims equal status, though practice changes slowly. It lasts in Morocco into the 1900s, and in Yemen until its Jews leave around 1950. Read more: The Ghetto System, The Russian Pogroms, The Dhimma.
Holocaust era. Jobs and citizenship taken. Germany, April 1933: a law pushes Jews out of government jobs. 1935: the Nuremberg Laws take away Jews’ citizenship. Read more: The Years Before the Killing.
1945 to today. Citizenship, travel, and the right to leave taken. Syria, from 1948: Jews need permission to travel or to sell property. Iraq, 1950 to 1951: Jews may leave only by giving up their citizenship, and then their property is frozen. Egypt, 1956: a new nationality law excludes “Zionists” and allows citizenship to be stripped, and mass arrests and expulsions follow. Soviet Union, about 1970 to 1991: Jews who ask to leave are refused exit visas and often punished. Read more: The Departure from MENA, The Jews of Iraq, Soviet Jewry.

Marked

Ancient. Singled out by a tax. Rome, from 70 CE: every Jew in the empire pays a special tax to Rome. Source: Josephus, The Jewish War 7.218; Suetonius, Life of Domitian 12.2.
Medieval. Clothing and badges. The Abbasid caliphate, 850: the caliph orders Jews and Christians to wear honey-colored clothing that marks them. Europe, from 1215: Church law requires special dress, which rulers turn into badges. Read more: The Dhimma, Adversus Judaeos.
Early modern and modern. Hats and badges. Venice: Jews leaving the ghetto by day must wear a yellow hat or badge. Rome, 1555: yellow hats. Read more: The Ghetto System, The Museum.
Holocaust era. The Jewish star. Nazi Germany and many lands it occupies force Jews to wear a Jewish star, usually yellow. Read more: The Nazi Synthesis.
1945 to today. ID papers and coded symbols. Syria, from the 1950s: identity cards mark Jews as Jews. Online: triple parentheses placed around Jewish names. Since October 7, 2023: an upside-down red triangle, taken from Hamas combat videos, painted on synagogues and Jewish sites to mark them as targets. Read more: The Departure from MENA, Hate Symbols.

Attacked

Ancient. Temples and homes destroyed. Elephantine, Egypt, 410 BCE: Egyptian priests, backed by a local Persian commander, destroy the Jewish temple. Alexandria, 38 CE: mobs attack Jewish homes and synagogues. Read more: Adversus Judaeos.
Medieval. Massacres. Granada, Spain, 1066: a mob kills much of the Jewish community in a day. The Rhineland, in Germany, 1096: crusading mobs destroy Jewish communities. North Africa and Spain, from about 1146: the Almohad rulers order Jews to convert, flee, or die. Read more: The Dhimma, The Blood Libel.
Early modern and modern. Pogroms and forced conversions. Morocco, 1790 to 1792: two years of attacks under the sultan. Mashhad, Iran, 1839: the city’s Jews are forced to convert to Islam. The Russian Empire, 1881 to 1906: waves of pogroms. Read more: The Dhimma, The Russian Pogroms.
Holocaust era. Pogroms. Germany and Austria, November 1938: Kristallnacht, organized by the Nazi regime. Baghdad, June 1941: the Farhud. Read more: The Years Before the Killing, The Jews of Iraq.
1945 to today. Pogroms and terror attacks. Tripoli, Libya, 1945. Aden, Yemen, and Aleppo, Syria, 1947. Djerba, Tunisia, 2002: an al-Qaeda bombing at the El Ghriba synagogue kills 21. Pittsburgh, 2018: a white supremacist kills eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue. Israel, October 7, 2023: Hamas-led attackers kill about 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Sydney, December 14, 2025: two gunmen kill fifteen people at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Read more: The Departure from MENA, Contemporary Antisemitism, The Terror Record.

Expelled

Ancient. Expelled from Rome, barred from Jerusalem. Rome, 19 CE: the emperor Tiberius expels the city’s Jews. 135 CE: after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, the emperor Hadrian bars Jews from Jerusalem, now the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina, and renames the province Syria Palaestina. Read more: The Continuous Jewish Presence in the Land. Ancient sources for Rome, 19 CE: Tacitus, Annals 2.85; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.81–84.
Medieval. Expelled from kingdoms. England, 1290. France, 1306. Spain, 1492. Portugal, 1497, mostly by forced conversion. Read more: The Expulsions.
Early modern and modern. Driven from their homes. Yemen, 1679: the ruler exiles the country’s Jews, and only the Jews, to Mawza, a barren strip near the Red Sea coast, where many die. Read more: The Dhimma.
Holocaust era. Pushed across borders. Germany, October 1938: about 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship are forced over the border into Poland. Read more: The Years Before the Killing.
1945 to today. Driven from the Middle East and North Africa. 1948 to the 1970s: several Arab governments treat their own Jewish citizens as the enemy. Through laws, expulsion orders, and violence, about 850,000 Jews leave or are forced out. Communities more than two thousand years old are almost entirely gone. Read more: The Departure from MENA.

Rebuilt

Ancient. Return and rebuild. Babylon destroys the First Temple in 586 BCE, and exiles return to rebuild it by 516 BCE. Rome destroys the Second Temple in 70 CE, and teachers at Yavneh rebuild Jewish life around study and prayer. Read more: The First and Second Temples, Judea in the Classical World.
Medieval. Rebuilding after massacre and expulsion. Worms, in Germany, rebuilds its synagogue in 1175, after the massacres of 1096. After 1492, Spain’s exiles rebuild in the Ottoman Empire and found Constantinople’s first printing press within two years. Read more: The Dhimma, The Expulsions.
Early modern and modern. A new world. America, about 1880 to 1924: more than two million Jews arrive, fleeing poverty and pogroms. Read more: American Jewry.
Holocaust era. Survivors rebuild. 1945 to 1948: in the displaced persons camps, survivors run their own schools, newspapers, and theater. Read more: Liberation and the Displaced Persons.
1945 to today. New homes. Survivors and refugees build new lives in Israel, France, America, and beyond. Airlifts carry Yemen’s Jews (1949 to 1950) and Iraq’s (1950 to 1952) to Israel. About 1.6 million Soviet Jews emigrate from the 1970s on. Read more: The Departure from MENA, Soviet Jewry.

Sources

Each Chapter cites its own primary sources and scholarship. The framing of antisemitism as a recurring pattern draws on the scholarly literature, including:

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954.
Anti-Defamation League. Antisemitism Uncovered: A Guide to Old Myths in a New Era. antisemitism.adl.org.
Cohen, Mark R. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Laqueur, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
Schäfer, Peter. Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Stanton, Gregory H. “The Ten Stages of Genocide.” Genocide Watch. genocidewatch.com.
Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Antisemitism.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org.
Wistrich, Robert S. A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. New York: Random House, 2010.

For the history of the badge shown in this page’s banner, see the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jewish Badge: Origins.

Comments?
Write to editor@teachjewishhistory.org.
Last updated: October 2026.

The Makor Project · teachjewishhistory.org · Printed for classroom use, free, non-commercial, sourced.